Summary: Serious reliability issues found in Microsoft's products

Xbox services are not known for reliability; in fact, with Windows at the back end, downtimes should be plentiful. As a matter of fact, little or no attention was paid to this new incident.

Behind the scenes at '1 vs. 100' as glitch shuts down Xbox show

...[S]hortly before they were to go live, the crew realized they couldn't get into the game. It turns out they weren't alone, as tens of thousands of people trying to log on also saw an error message. The show -- which is still in beta -- ultimately wasn't broadcast last night because of what was described as a database error. The studio crew stayed calm throughout the situation, doing everything they could to resolve it before ultimately realizing it was out of their hands. They expect to be back online for tonight's broadcast.

This type of poor engineering has led to a show-stopper. Remember the BSoD at the opening ceremonies in last year's Olympic Games? The organisers used Windows XP and refused to use Vista, claiming that it was not reliable. Well, Vista's successor too is more of the same. Slated has found some links which confirm poor hardware support in Vista 7 [1, 2, 3]. How about these?

mertkan

Posted 03 August 2009 - 03:00 AM yesterday i make a clean install of windows 7 rtm 7600.it installed with no problem.it installed all the drivers but not the graphics cards.it didn't recognize it.my 8600M Gs show like this "Vga Graphic Adapter" so i installed 185.85 dox.i restart my pc.it was all normal until my pc frezees.in 5 minutes my pc freeze's.so i tried other drivers but no solution.i tried like 15 drivers.all of them were clean installs.when i rollback my driver and return to vga graphic adapter there is no problem.it doesn't freeze.is there any drivers that can work with windows 7 smooth?

graphic card:8600M GS

[...]

Guest_Blokeski_*

Posted 06 August 2009 - 04:52 AM I had EXACTLY the same error. It was only showing as a "Standard VGA adaptor". Nothing I could do would get Windows 7 to change that.

Any ideas?

"Windows 7 "graceful" recovery from graphics issues," Slated remarks, showing that there "is yet another "feature" that doesn't work, apparently."

chuckles021 €  02-07-2009 at 06:31:31 PM

I'm having problems with my graphics card, system hard freezes and requires reset button to continue. Upon reboot, if I disable graphics driver and run in vga mode these hard freezes no longer occur. But the trade-off is that I have no 3d accelleration, can't play any games. I have tried ati's catalyst 8.x for vista and 9.x for vista as well as the beta release for Win 7, all drivers load and appear to work but system will freeze when 3d acceleration occurs, ie when games load. I have a mobile hard drive tray installed to easily switch out hard drives and this only occurs when using the Windows 7 installation, I also have Win xp and and Win 2000 on other hard drives and the graphics work properly with the other systems(same configuration just different os with their respective drivers). I can't help but think it is a driver issue with win 7 and my graphics card.

[...]

gully50 €  05-21-2009 at 11:50:52 AM

I'm having the same exact problem as chuckles21. Im running on WIN7 RC1, display adapter is Geforce 7950GT. Mobo is Asus P5B. I've tried several nvidia drivers, flashed motherboard bios, to no avail. Nothing works. Only way to prevent the screen from freezing is disabling drivers completely and running at vga resolution.

Would hate to have to install XP back, does not feel like this problem should exist.

Yet some people insist that Vista 7 will be a success. The same thing was said about Vista before it was released and as we've shown repeatedly, it's all marketing. In the next post we will show how Microsoft achieves such "perception management" [1, 2, 3]. ⬆

"If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good."

--Bill Gates, Microsoft